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So here’s the end, folks! The last couple of weeks sort of flew by. I’ve got a lot to cram into this final post, so bear with me.

• Here’s what I had originally drawn for the last panel to try to give it a bit more of a ‘cinematic’ feel, but it got vetoed due to the sort of forceful perspective of the drawing. It drew away a little too much from what was important.

• The reading last week at Powell’s went pretty well. The crowd was a little smaller than I had thought it would be, but I realized I had stiff competition with other First Thursday events like Reading Frenzy’s 17th anniversary and the Floating World event with Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.

This was my favorite picture taken, courtesy of my friend Courtney. I was describing how if you have more words in a panel, I have less room to draw and was illustrating it with hand gestures.

And if you are interested in purchasing and of the original pages, they’re all for sale! You can download a price list here. Most of the pages are $100, though ones that have missing panels due to digital altering or what not are $65, and some of the pages I’m more attached to are a little higher.

Note: The pages are just numbered according to their order chronologically. This means that because of the two pages that were added, it will be different from the order that we serialized it in, and should match the order the story was published in. Though the page numbers won’t match up because there are the chapter breaks. If you have any questions and just want to ask me ‘How much is the page where Neil does X?’, I can do that too.

And if you do want to purchase a page, you can e-mail Marci, the curator of the gallery to arrange payment.

• There was a really great review of Americus by The Comics Journal published last week. You can read it here.

• If you’re going to be at SPX, please stop by and say hi. MK and I will be at table H-16, next to Tugboat Press and Alec Longstreth! We’ll have copies of Americus for sale, some of our old books, and the secret SPX project that we’ve been working on for sale. And to tease, here’s a mockup of the cover image:

• Thanks everyone for reading and commenting! We really, really appreciate it. And I would also like to thank a couple of people who you have probably already heard us mention lots and lots:

Greg Means – Americus wouldn’t have happened without him. From putting MK and I together, to publishing the first chapter in Papercutter, to editing. Three cheers for Greg Means!

Galen Longstreth – for her insight and editorial help before First Second picked it up.

Jason Rainey – he helped tone half the Apathea pages in the book, and was there to help me when I was stuck on layouts or composition. He also made some really, really, really great animated .gifs that need to get passed around the internet somehow.

and of course, Calista, Colleen, Gina, and Mark over at First Second. I am so honored to be in the roster of such an amazing publisher.

Go pick up a copy of Americus if you haven’t yet. And don’t stop coming to Save Apathea now that the book is done being serialized online. We still have lots of stuff planned, and we’ll be posting all the Americus related news here, so make sure to check back in. Just give it a couple of weeks for us to get Save Apthea v. 2.0 up and running.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon hanging all 200 pages up at the Basil Hallward Gallery on the 3rd floor of Powell’s.

It was pretty awesome to see the pages up on a wall instead of in a stack in my flat drawers. Also kind of weird to see them all up and think ‘This was three years of my life.’

Here are some pictures:

All of the original pages are for sale, except for this one and this one. Most of them will be priced at a low $100, though ones that have had a significant amount of digital alteration will be cheaper at $65, and some of the cooler Apathea sequences that I’m kind of attached to will be priced at $200. I still need to go through and make the price list, but I will post that stuff here when I do, as well as the contact information for the gallery in case anyone is interested in buying pieces.

If you’re in Portland, don’t forget to swing by Thursday for the opening reception and reading. I’ll post some pictures of the event afterwards.

And Kathy Moon reminded me that our guest book review of Teenagers from Mars was featured on Unshelved last Friday. You can check it out here.